A drama about the lost years of young William Shakespeare after his arrival to London in 1589 -- when theatre was like rock and roll and a young man with a dream changed the world with his words.
Will doesn't seem that interested in Shakespeare as a playwright. And the resulting attempts to shoehorn him into other roles -- sultry lover, newly minted celebrity, reluctant renegade -- make for a frequently befuddling viewing experience.
As it stands now, I don't relish watching more of Will until it starts to veer away from the clichés and give us a young Shakespeare worth rooting for.
Will is a nicely diverting show that's fun enough. It likely won't go down in history as one of the best tellings of Shakespeare's story, but it doesn't take itself too seriously, and the way in embraces the ridiculous without holding back is impressive.
This is no biography, and it's certainly not a documentary... It's also a lot of fun, lively and fast-paced, with comedy, tragedy, action and history, just as audiences of 1589, and today, demand.
He's Shakespeare, but what's in a name? Pearce rummages around behind that name and finds much to consider from the storyteller's point of view -- sound and fury signifying something simmering with the write stuff.
TNT's Will does a surprisingly entertaining and sometimes even thoughtful job of this in presenting Shakespeare as a wide-eyed, young gun writer hoping to make his mark in order to feed his wife and their three children.
For all its frenetic pacing, Will seems wheezily old-fashioned, the umpteenth attempt to attract a young audience to great art by modernizing it -- except that Will's ideas of modernity are a half-century old.
Will is fun, like a supercharged Shakespeare in Love, but the regalia, pacing, and dazzling colors often seem like compensations for a somewhat obvious and awkwardly expository script.
